Suchergebnisse

This article looks at the evolution of international competitiveness in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s, focusing on the microeconomic and sectoral aspects. It evaluates the competitive performance of the region's countries, contrasting it with that of their main competitors in the developing world; it analyses the corporate actors involved, including the subsidiaries of transnational enterprises and large locally owned firms; and it sets forth some political considerations. (CEPAL Rev/DÜI)

Recent trends suggest that international economic law may be witnessing a renaissance of convergence - both parallel and intersectional. The adjudicative process also reveals signs of convergence. These diverse claims of convergence are of legal, empirical and normative interest. Yet, convergence discourse also warrants scepticism. This volume contributes to both the general debate on the fragmentation of international law and the narrower discourse concerning the interplay between international trade and investment, focusing on dispute settlement. It moves beyond broad observations or singular case studies to provide an informed and wide-reaching assessment by investigating multiple standards, processes, mechanisms and behaviours. Methodologically, a normative stance is largely eschewed in favour of a range of 'doctrinal,' quantitative and qualitative methods that are used to address the research questions. Furthermore, in determining the extent of convergence or divergence, it is important to recognize that there is no bright line or clear yardstick for determining its nature or degree.

The co-ordinator of external research activities at the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah presents a comparative survey of the main issues of the agricultural co-operatives in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey (co-operative law, state intervention, structure and organisation, management, the Islamic dimension, etc.). It is based on the conclusions of a research project which was carried out on the agricultural co-operative movement in some member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Countries in 1988. (DÜI-Hns)

Since a few years, humanitarian non-govemmental organisations (NGOs) are faced with increased insecurity in some of the regions in which they work. Given that humanitarians traditionally consider themselves to be protected by their neutrality, assurning that assisting those in need will automatically ensure acceptance of their work by the local population and the conflicting parties, the increased insecurity challenges the identity of humanitarian NGOs. Hence, addressing this insecurity proves challenging for NGOs, which is why they tend to shy away from taking steps in this direction. Nevertheless, many hurnanitarian NGOs are changing their attitudes towards security issues and have, for example, established an internal security management and exchange security-relevant information among each other. An analysis based on 27 semi-structured interviews reveals that this development can be explained by the activities of an epistemic community ofhurnanitarian secu-rity experts. The latter is neither primarily nor exclusively composed of scientists, but of individuals coming from different sectors who share a professional expertise, on the one hand, and a particular set of values, on the other. Those two elements explain not only the internal cohesion ofthe epistemic community, but also why the standards it formulates are accepted by other non-state and even by governmental actors and, hence, why the epistemic community can be considered to dispose of authority. (Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen / SWP)

Why have ASEAN member states declared and why do they continue to declare their intention to enhance cooperation and devise projects when implementation lags behind their rhetoric? Why do they rhetorically commit themselves to cooperation, when they continue to stick to self-interested policies to the detriment of ASEAN's collective interest? And given these diverging practices, how likely is it that the objective of a more legalized and binding cooperation associated with the recently ratified ASEAN Charter is being implemented? This article draws attention to ASEAN's hybrid or dual character of international cooperation, consisting of the emulation of the European integration project and the persistence of deeper cultural strata of Southeast Asia's cooperation project that determine the limits of cooperation: Southeast Asia's social structure and political culture that have not produced those mechanisms that might facilitate international cooperation. If our explanation is correct that cooperation within ASEAN comes about as a simultaneous process of emulation and established cultural practices, we expect change only under specified conditions. Based on our argument and the theoretical literature on normative change, we identify and discuss in greater detail three potential outcomes of change: inertia, localization and transformation. The three modes make different predictions concerning change within ASEAN. Based on an analysis of the two major shocks with which ASEAN has had to contend in the last two decades, namely the Cold War in Asia and the Asian financial crisis, we argue that ASEAN's dominant response to major ideational challenges has been combinations of localization and inertia and has not been followed by a fundamental change of practice. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

Terrorism has become a global phenomenon over recent decades. The attacks on the United States in 2001 prompted a 'global war on terror', the implementation of which has led to a significant aggrandizement of executive power in the US at the expense of the legislature, ostensibly the 'most powerful' representative assembly in the world. In this volume, seasoned scholars focus on the effects of terrorism and antiterrorism on executive-legislative relations in a range of countries whose citizens have experienced terrorism, including those from Australia, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Russia, and the UK. Has the pattern of accretion of executive power in the United States been replicated in all these systems? Or have other institutional and other factors, including the structure of the party system and the specific coalitional nature of the governments, served to mitigate changes in the balance of legislative and executive power in these systems? The volume, which is based on original research, reaches some surprising conclusions, which disabuse expectations based on the US experience.